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I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

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Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#301

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

tharkun__ wrote: post #293
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I could make a decision about whether I'd want to work for a company on the basis of a single employee's attitude. That person might not even be part of my day to day work group.

And yet the company chose to let themselves be represented by this person. It might also go the other way around, you are interviewed by someone that's awesome and you end up with another team that truly sucks. In that case bad luck but if they send a dick to interview you it is more likely that the rest of them are also gonna be dicks. I like companies where you actually interview with some of the people you will be…

I mean, this is all the surmise of the person writing the article. I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that the interviewer never actually did anything wrong in the actual event described.

In terms of your idea that a single interviewer should turn you off from working for a company, possibly. Companies can be pretty big. I am skeptical that there are many medium or large companies that can prevent all negative interviewing experiences. Especially if the negative experience is, "I saw my interviewer make a facial expression that I over-analyzed and made a huge narrative about."

That said, if you want to use that as a signal that's your prerogative. My guess is that you'd mostly get false negatives from this signal but if you have many options for employment that's hardly a major problem.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#302

Post by iainctduncan »

IMHO, having done a fair whack of sales and negotiation in my work, the best way to suss these things out is to hit them back with questions.

"Before I answer, can you clarify if we're talking about MVC as the term was used for Smalltalk applications or as it's used now to refer to web frameworks?"

If they look at you blankly about Smalltalk, you know what kind of answer you're supposed to give. If they smile and chuckle, you get to nerd the fuck out. :-)

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#303

Post by Buttons840 »

lmilcin wrote: post #290
Buttons840 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the comments above yours in the thread mention any form of the word "fast" or "speed". They mention "performance" in reference to big-O complexity. Big-O is not always about speed.

> None of the comments above yours in the thread mention any form of the word "fast" or "speed". They mention "performance" in reference to big-O complexity. Big-O is not always about speed. I am sorry, do you want to say "performance" and "big-O" have nothing to with trying to make the program go faster? I think you have lost your way and need to backtrack a little bit. The whole point of big-O analysis is to be abl…

If I ask for something to be done in O(1) I'm not asking for it to be fast, I'm asking for it to take the exact same amount of time every time no matter what. That might end up being slower, but so what, maybe that's what I need.

If I ask for an O(1) algorithm and you build something that is as fast as possible, faster in every case, but sometimes it's really fast and sometimes it's a little less fast but still fast -- well, then it's not O(1) and not what I asked for. It may be fast, but if it's sometimes faster than at other times it's not O(1).

Thus, I do not consider big-O to be synonymous with speed. They are different, because the best possible big-O, O(1), does not necessarily mean the fastest.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#304

Post by DangitBobby »

lmilcin wrote: post #290
Buttons840 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the comments above yours in the thread mention any form of the word "fast" or "speed". They mention "performance" in reference to big-O complexity. Big-O is not always about speed.

> None of the comments above yours in the thread mention any form of the word "fast" or "speed". They mention "performance" in reference to big-O complexity. Big-O is not always about speed. I am sorry, do you want to say "performance" and "big-O" have nothing to with trying to make the program go faster? I think you have lost your way and need to backtrack a little bit. The whole point of big-O analysis is to be abl…

Replying here because I can't to the relevant comment:

> No it’s not, it’s about trying to quantify algorithmic complexity.

And what would you say is the goal of quantifying algorithmic complexity?

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#305

Post by qu4z-2 »

munificent wrote: post #141
chaps wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a thought -- gaming is latency sensitive. Maybe their issue with it wasn't about average performance, but that the once-in-a-while perf hit would be enough to cause a bad experience for the person playing the game? I know I'd be frustrated if there was a predictable lag spike while playing a game.

No, latency didn't come up. (I agree that could be a reason not to use a dynamic array.) They were hung up on the idea that a dynamic array must be O(n) because at least some of the appends copy.

You explicitly said they were hung up on the "worst case O(n)" situation, so I suspect they were concerned about the latency. Insertion into a dynamic array has a worst case of O(n) and an average case of O(1), no?

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#306

Post by _carbyau_ »

My first interviewer for a Service Desk job:

Interviewer was super nervous, visibly shaking! I poured myself, and him, a glass of water and took a sip. He took a sip, and visibly calmed down.

The answer to every "Do you know XYZ?" IT product was a meek "No". But I still got the job.

Their reasoning? You can teach a nice person technical things with proven interest. It is hard to teach a technically knowledgeable person to be nice.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#307

Post by Buttons840 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #304
lmilcin wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the comments above yours in the thread mention any form of the word "fast" or "speed". They mention "performance" in reference to big-O complexity. Big-O is not always about speed. I am sorry, do you want to say "performance" and "big-O" have nothing to with trying to make the program go faster? I think you have lost your way and need to backtrack a little bit. The whole point of big-O analysis is to be abl…

Replying here because I can't to the relevant comment: > No it’s not, it’s about trying to quantify algorithmic complexity. And what would you say is the goal of quantifying algorithmic complexity?

In cryptography the goal might be to ensure the algorithm always takes the exact same amount of time, or the exact same number of CPU instructions, even if it is slower than alternatives. This is a case where we are interested in complexity without regard to speed.

Thus, the answer to why we care about complexity is "it depends". But it is not always about speed.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#308

Post by planet-and-halo »

slavak wrote: post #215
planet-and-halo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a less dramatic one where someone argued with me that the lookup time on a binary tree was O(H), the height of the tree, not O(log2n). I was so baffled by the argument that I didn't realize until after the interview that I should have pointed out that the height of a binary tree is log2n.

They were technically correct. The lookup time on a binary search tree is O(H), which is equal to O(log2n) if the tree is balanced. Tree data structures invest a lot of complexity into keeping the tree balanced.

Doesn't this only affect inserts and deletes though? I mean I get your point, but on a read you can assume that a binary tree is balanced (by definition). Or am I missing something?

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#309

Post by dcow »

DangitBobby wrote: post #304
lmilcin wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the comments above yours in the thread mention any form of the word "fast" or "speed". They mention "performance" in reference to big-O complexity. Big-O is not always about speed. I am sorry, do you want to say "performance" and "big-O" have nothing to with trying to make the program go faster? I think you have lost your way and need to backtrack a little bit. The whole point of big-O analysis is to be abl…

Replying here because I can't to the relevant comment: > No it’s not, it’s about trying to quantify algorithmic complexity. And what would you say is the goal of quantifying algorithmic complexity?

BTW I've found that in cases where the reply and/or edit button(s) disappear, refreshing the page usually causes them to appear.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#310

Post by ryandrake »

chaps wrote: post #118

Hah, I'm way too stubborn to give a wrong answer. Once had an interview where the interviewer asked me how to identify open connections on a linux host. Told him my go-to was `lsof -i` because fuck yeah, `lsof`. He told me no, the answer was `netstat`, which I took as a fun opportunity to explain why I prefer `lsof -i` over netstat. They still thought I was wrong and I got the impression that they took it as a challe…

This reminds me of a post that made the rounds here a few years ago: Google's Director of Engineering Hiring Test[1]. "Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper"

1: http://www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html

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